Ascher kurthatêr Stahrke
=Personal Details= Ascher was born and raised on Morlokan V, a small rim colony in the Morlokan System, just outside the boundaries of the Federation. Situated entirely underground owing to hostile surface conditions, the colony supported itself through the mining of crystal deposits that were sold to passing traders, who then resold them at Federation outposts. He was a rapid learner at the colony’s home schooling program, and showed an aptitude for languages and history that would have earned him an academic career on other, more highly populated and advanced colonies. Instead, as his parents before him – and virtually everyone else on the colony – had, he became a miner upon graduation at age 14. Four years later, when physical symptoms of heart trouble forced him to undergo an in-depth medical exam, it was discovered that he had an inherited genetic disorder that led to heart valve failure. As the required treatment was beyond the level of care available at the colony, his parents petitioned the colony to invest in its future by absorbing the cost of the treatment. The vote was a success, and Ascher was placed in cold-sleep inside one of the colony’s emergency survival capsules to await the arrival of one of the regular independent freighters for transport to a Federation facility where the surgery could be performed. While in he was in suspension, however, the colony was utterly destroyed by a spaced-based crystalline entity that moved into the system too quickly for the colonists to summon assistance, and tore the mountain range that housed the colony apart to get at the crystalline deposits contained therein and feed upon them. Thrown clear of the devastation owing to its placement at the colony’s landing facility, Ascher’s hibernation pod was spared, making him the only survivor of the colony. The pod was found a week later by the passing freighter that had been to take him to seek treatment, and the traders dutifully passed him along to the first Starfleet vessel they encountered, a Federation Border Patrol vessel. The Border Patrol vessel, in turn, transferred him to a Starfleet ship, and it was there, after being revived and while undergoing treatment, that he learned of the fate of his colony, family, friends, and everyone he’d ever known. Upon release from sickbay, Ascher, having nowhere else to go, inquired as to the possibility of enlistment in Starfleet. The ship’s Operations Manager, after feeding Ascher’s skills summary and test results into the Fleet database prior to sending his application on, received a flag that an individual with Ascher’s skills was being sought for a long-term assignment to a geological research project sponsored by the New Vulcan Science Institute that departed from within the sector in only a week. After discussion with Ascher, the critical job skills waiver was applied, and Ascher joined Starfleet as an enlisted Crewman Recruit on January 3, 2367 and departed for his duty assignment on January 8, 2367. Publically, the Nevras Delta Geological Research Station was designed to study the crystalline structures present on Nevras Delta and its ring system, in the hopes that methods of artificial culturing them could be devised. Privately, the New Vulcan Science Institute was hoping to do so in order that they might secure a new source of the stones used to store and hold Vulcan katras after the death of their bearers. Owing to the closeness of the Klingon border, the facility was constructed entirely underground by the personnel assigned there to help avoid detection, and was planned for a thirty-year project cycle to provide enough time for the crystal’s growth cycle to be properly studied and duplicated. The personnel assigned were all young and either from long-lived species with an interest in the project’s success, or were individuals with no attachments to prevent them from serving the full tour of duty there. The nature of the assignment meant that most personnel cross-trained in other jobs to ensure that all tasks were done, and Ascher rapidly shifted from constructing the facility to maintaining it, accruing a steady series of promotions over the years, until he was the ranking NCO at the facility, and indeed, the *'only'* NCO at the facility after a death caused by local predators, the rest of the project group being scientists and warrant officers. His skill and love for cooking was awakened during the assignment, and he honed it as the facility’s cook for fifteen years, teaching himself everything he could from the cookbooks on file in the facility’s data storage unit. Owing to the nature of the project, strict military discipline was never enforced, and over the years personal relationships formed, ended, and reformed across not just rank and educative divisions, but species divisions as well. For Ascher, the most enduring of the relationships that he formed there was his marriage to T’ren, the widow of the Vulcan science team leader, Sevak, and co-leader of the project. After Sevak’s death in the fourth year of the mission at the hands of local predators, Ascher grew close to T’ren while studying some Vulcan cooking methods that required an understanding of Vulcan philosophy to interpret the recipes. Her quiet acknowledgement of his need for privacy and shared interest in history attracted him, and she, in turn, was drawn to his analytical approach to studying Vulcan cultural elements and comparing them to those of Earth to form a personal culture that was uniquely his own. When, during the ninth year of the assignment, she entered pon farr, it was to Ascher she turned for assistance, and shortly following that, the two acknowledged that they had moved beyond mere friends and co-workers and married in a simple ceremony from Terran history, remaining together for the next ten years. Late in 2386, increasing Klingon traffic in the system made it apparent that the facility’s existence was suspected, if not positively known. When translations revealed that a force aimed at destroying the facility was on the way, the project members drew lots to see who would essay an escape and who would remain. Ascher chose to remain with his wife at the facility when the escape was made, despite drawing a lot that would have allowed him to join the attempt, suspecting that the attempt was doomed to failure and choosing to not leave T’ren alone to face the Klingons when they arrived. T’ren, logically, chose not to protest this decision, and instead simply rendered her husband unconscious and placed him in one of the project’s two hibernation pods which she then loaded on the remaining shuttle and programmed it to seek out an orbit in the crowded planetary ring system and power down to await a Federation rescue team two days before the Klingons arrived, and three days after they had pursued and destroyed the escaping project members. Ascher’s pod was discovered by the Federation Pathfinder Team sent to discover why the project had missed their quarterly check-in, and he was revived to assist them in investigating the ruins of the project facility, allowing them to identify the remains of his friends and his wife, but retrieve no data. Upon his return with the Pathfinder Team, Ascher requested enough leave to journey to New Vulcan and speak to T’ren’s parents, and then, lacking anything else to do, or anywhere else to go, requested a new duty assignment from Starfleet. A request from the New Vulcan Ambassador to the Federation sped the process along, and Ascher found himself offered his choice of positions within his qualifications aboard the USS Miranda, choosing that of the Captain’s Mess Cook. =Personality Profile= For someone that has essentially lost everyone he has ever known on two separate occasions, Ascher is remarkably well adjusted. He accepts that there are things beyond his control and that sometimes they happen to people that do not deserve it. He doesn’t hate the universe as a whole for what’s happened to him, the Klingons as a race for what they did on Nevras Delta, or even, really, the crystalline entity that destroyed the Morlokan Colony – he’d just rather that it had happened to someone else, that’s all. Since that’s obviously impossible, he’s decided in the aftermath of the loss of the Nevras Delta facility that he’s willing to settle for it not happening to him again. As part and parcel of those losses, and his attempts to deal with them, he is resistant to making personal connections with those around him, although not fanatically so. He’s not so much actively unfriendly, as simply remote or reserved, as he attempts to decide whether or not he’s both strong enough and willing to allow himself to make connections again so that the universe can take them all away for a third time. As such, he prefers to keep to himself much of the time, either studying or practicing new dishes before offering them on the Captain’s Mess menu, and rarely ventures out to participate in ship-wide social events, or accepts invitations to NCO-only events. His home colony’s reasons for founding notwithstanding, Ascher personally has no particular disdain for non-Terran cultures or cultural elements. He’s even willing to adopt them into his own personal cultural library on a case-by-case basis, with the caveat that he doesn’t necessarily believe that they are automatically better or superior simply because they are ‘alien.’ He studies each element for usefulness and adaptability to his individual needs, weighing and contrasting it with similar elements from Terran history, before making any decisions. This has, for example, led to his adopting elements of Vulcan philosophy to his outlook on life and as part of the way he analyzes his surroundings – but only as a component of his overall approach, not as a replacement for his pre-existing system. As a member of a closed-in, underground society in his childhood and adolescence, and later as a member of the small and equally enclosed Nevras Delta project, he values his privacy much more highly than someone who grew up in a less enclosed environment. He doesn’t ask others personal questions, and finds individuals asking them of him without permission to be extremely rude. His personal space is, to an extreme not understood except by those with similar backgrounds, a psychological necessity, and he reacts to intrusions into it without invitation hostilely. Conversely, any individual to which he issues such an invitation has, for all intents and purposes, been made a member of his family, although they may not realize that fact. He is less reactionary regarding his workspace, regarding it as ‘shared’ to a degree, and will permit others into it to talk or spend time so long as they do not interfere with his duties. Individuals taking advantage of this flexibility are often put to work, finding themselves stirring food or washing dishes without quite being sure how that happened. Owing to the enclosed nature of both his home colony and the facility at Nevras Delta, and his lack of time on planetary surfaces has spent a total of 27.5 hours under the open sky since his birth, none of it where he could see the stars, he is agoraphobic to a marked degree, becoming uncomfortable in areas and rooms with too much open space that lack definable walls and ceilings. He sits with his back to open viewports aboard ship, and has the blast shutters closed over the viewports in his quarters at all times. Normal planetside life is so difficult for him to manage that it would be impossible in the long-term, but shorter trips of several days might be possible if he spent the majority of each day in an enclosed area. longest contiguous stay on a planetary surface was the 9 hours he was on New Vulcan to return T'ren's katra stone to her parents, and his emotional distress over his loss was so great that it overrode his other issues until almost the end of the stay. For similar reasons, he also finds large groups of people disturbing, and prefers to avoid them when possible. He’s an extremely well-read, self-taught historian and, had he the desire for it, could quickly pile up several degrees in the field, particularly in the sub-fields of Terran and Vulcan history. He reads a large number of languages without speaking them, feeling that a culture’s history should be read in the language of that culture to be fully understood. Likewise, he’s an excellent self-taught chef of professional caliber and believes that a culture’s cooking should be read and understood in its language to be truly mastered. He has a large library of recorded cooking shows – many subtitled for languages he does not know – that he watches during off hours, ranging from Iron Chef Federation to The Barefoot Centauran. Aside from his cooking talents, he has extensive experience in underground mining – especially dealing with crystalline formations – and construction, is a geologist of some skill, and possesses the knowledge to repair and operate many devices used in that environment. He also has a wide variety of skills carried over from his youth at the Morlokan Colony and time on Nevras Delta, ranging from systems repair and jury-rigging (particularly of communications, kitchen, and sensors devices somewhat behind the SOTA), to sewing up damaged uniforms, to first aid up to the basic trauma level, to a working knowledge of how to operate most basic Federation shipboard and station-emplaced systems (with transporters and tactical systems being notable exceptions). After years of practice, he possesses the ability to identify approximately seven hundred individual spices by taste while blindfolded, but doesn’t advertise that fact. He believes in keeping fit, and maintains a balanced exercise program that contains elements borrowed from Terran Tai Chi and a Vulcan equivalent, weightlifting and aerobic training, and regular bouts of handball rarely plays against living opponents. He can swim, but is not an expert at it, owing to a lack of places to practice the art both growing up and at Nevras Delta; he keeps meaning to get around to improving his level of ability, but never quite manages it. =Special Notes= Medical Note 1: Ascher possesses a single-talent, uncontrolled telepathic ability in the form of a mind shield of exceptional strength. His thoughts cannot be read or his mind influenced through the shield. Although it could conceivably be cracked given sufficient telepathic force, such force would likely destroy his mind in the process. Telepaths perceive the shield in different ways depending on the nature of their own gifts and individual personalities, from simply not ‘seeing’ him telepathically, to envisioning it as ‘armor,’ to other, more individual perceptions. Ascher has no control over this talent, and cannot lower it, modulate it, or alter its coverage or existence in any way. It is always on, and always at full strength. He was, in fact, unaware that the shield even existed until his wife, T’ren, remarked upon it part-way through his time on Nevras Delta. His medical file does not currently list this ability. Medical Note 2: During the treatment for the genetic defect that was causing his heart valves to fail, he received physician-supervised retroviral genetic treatments to correct the defect and prevent it from reappearing. As a result, his genetic structure reads as having been modified when tests are run to search for such things, but the specific nature of the modification is not apparent. This information is in his medical file. Personnel Records Note: Virtually all of the personal historical information above is *'not'* contained within Ascher’s personnel jacket. Aside from vital statistics, planet of origin, referring notes to the reports filed by the Border Patrol vessel and the USS Shandral, and a notation about his heart valve treatment aboard the Shandral, the only other information contained therein is the notification of his enlistment, his critical skills waiver, the notification of assignment to the Nevras Delta project, a series of promotion notifications arriving at regular intervals from the Project, referring notes to the Pathfinder Team’s report, and a simple, three line request from the Vulcan ambassador, asking that Ascher be “assigned to a duty station where his talents will be of as much use to the Federation as they have been to my people.” Morlokan Colony Notes (information available with some library searching): The colony in the Morlokan system was a small one, settled by an isolationist group who were trying to shed themselves of much of the ‘excess multi-special influences’ they saw in Federation culture. Founding members picked elements from many cultures and eras of Terran history to create a culture that was, while decidedly odd, nonetheless purely Terran, and created an artificial language for the colony that was assembled from as many Terran languages as would fit (making it a linguist’s dream or nightmare, depending on one’s viewpoint). Lacking the funding to compete for an ideal Class M planet, the colonists chose to settle on a less desirable rim world that while still M-Class, was wracked by dust and static lightning storms, requiring the colony to be built underground. As this placed them in near proximity to deposits of crystals that were in demand for many modern technologies (notably communications, weapons, and scanning devices) this was deemed less of a hardship than might otherwise have been the case. The resulting egalitarian mining colony prospered for almost seventy years before, on August 19, 2366, it was destroyed by a space-based crystalline entity that literally ripped the underground colony apart and scattered it across the surface of the planet to get at and consume the crystal veins the Morlokani mined. A tramp freighter passing through the system followed a fading emergency beacon to find one survivor in a cold-sleep pod by a tramp freighter Benetan, see Border Patrol report 77895-17GT31; ISV Benetan lost with all hands three months after passing through Morlokan System, see Border Patrol report 77895-33GT45, placed there to await medical treatment for a life-threatening illness, and subsequently transferred the pod to Federation Border Patrol Ship Xenalti Xenalti destroyed in pre-nova evacuation of [[Hammerlich VI] November 24, 2366], and then to USS Shandral. Shandral destroyed in action against unidentified ship March 22, 2367. While active, the colony was not a Federation member, and had little or no outside contact except through the small independent freighters that transported their mining product to larger colonies for marketing. Linguistic Notes (information available with some searching in linguistic journals) Ascher’s colony’s culture used a naming system where the father’s given name, with an added genitive ‘–ou’ ending, was used as the surname of a spouse or children, accompanied by a linking attributer as given below: kurthunê – ‘god-given daughter of’ kurthanê – ‘god-given wife of’ kurthatêr – ‘god-given son of’ Nevras Delta Geological Research Station Notes (information available with proper searches and clearances) The Nevras Delta Geological Research Station was a long-term manned project sponsored by the New Vulcan Science Institute, designed to study both the planetary geology of Nevras Delta and the astro-geological makeup of the planet’s rings. The station, located on an inhospitable world in the Nevras system just outside Klingon space, was designed to study the crystalline formations present on Nevras Delta and in the planetary ring system in the hopes that the natural growth cycle of the crystals could be duplicated in a laboratory environment. Owing to the location, the Nevras Delta facility was planned for a thirty-year no-relief/no-resupply utility cycle, with the same crew operating the facility for the entire life-cycle of the project in order to minimize the possibility of hostile action by Klingon forces. The facility was entirely underground, and constructed by the operating personnel - 2 newly-married Vulcans, 8 human males, 6 human females, 1 Alpha Centauran male, 2 Romulan females, and 1 Denobulan male - who were to live there for the duration of the project. Communications were severely constrained, lest unwanted Klingon attentions be attracted, and were returned to Federation space by burst transmission bi-annually when Nevras Delta was at the point in its orbit that placed the system’s stellar body squarely between the planet and the sector to shield the transmissions, which were hoped to be lost in the stellar primary’s activity. The facility performed according to parameters for 2/3 of its planned-for life-cycle, and then ceased transmission in late 2386. Upon insertion of a Pathfinder Recovery team, the station was discovered to have been destroyed by orbital bombardment and ground action by Klingon forces on December 25, 2386. On February 14, 2387, Pathfinders located a single survivor in cold-sleep hibernation aboard one of the facilities’ shuttles which had been powered down to minimal settings and was drifting in the planetary ring system. Federation Pathfinder Team 235 Report 2658-PFR-4569; Pathfinder Team 235 lost to training accident April 4, 2387, no survivors. =Service Record= *2367: Crewman Recruit, standard training bypassed with critical skills waiver, assigned to Nevras Delta Geological Research Station *2368: Crewman Apprentice, Nevras Delta Geological Research Station *2370: Crewman, Nevras Delta Geological Research Station *2372: Petty Officer Third Class, Nevras Delta Geological Research Station *2375: Petty Officer Second Class, Nevras Delta Geological Research Station *2378: Petty Officer First Class, Nevras Delta Geological Research Station *2381: Chief Petty Officer, Nevras Delta Geological Research Station *2387 - Pres: Chief Petty Officer, Assigned to [[USS Miranda (NCC-77000)|USS Miranda]], Captain’s Mess Cook Starfleet Decorations *2377: 10 Years Service Ribbon *2387: 20 Years Service Ribbon Reprimands None =Miscellaneous Information= Family *Mother: Sylveth kurthanê Stahrkou (Mining Engineer) deceased *Father: Stahrke kurthatêr Farlahnou (Shift Supervisor) deceased *Brother: Shean kurthatêr Stahrkou (Miner) deceased *Sister: Jeneeth kurthunê Stahrkou (Repair Technician) deceased *Wife: T’ren kurthanê Ascherou (Geologist and Crystallographer) deceased *Mother-in-Law: T'cre (Computer Systems Analyst) *Father-in-Law: Selan (Statistician) Personal Interests Cooking; History (especially Terran and Vulcan); teaching himself to read a new language Linguistic Proficiency Federation Standard (native), Morlokani (native), Vulcan (native), Klingon (basic conversation), Romulan , Andorian , Alpha Centauran , Betazoid , Cardassian , Terran French , Terran Japanese , Terran Mandarin Chinese , several others at beginning literacy level only. =Uniforms= Category:USS Miranda (NCC-77000) Personnel Category:Operations Personnel Category:Service Personnel Category:Chief Petty Officers Category:Humans Category:Starfleet Personnel Category:Player Characters